© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2013 DOI: 10.1163/17455227-12100206 Aramaic Studies 10 (2012) 215–247 Aramaic Studies brill.com/arst Phonetic Spellings of the Subordinating Particle d(y) in the Jewish Babylonian Aramaic Magic Bowls J.N. Ford Bar-Ilan University For Prof. Shaul Shaked Abstract Te Jewish Babylonian Aramaic magic bowls date to the late Sasanian and very early Islamic periods. Tey are for the most part written in an archaic literary dialect (or dialects) that appears to have significantly differed from the spoken language of Babylonian Jews at that time. Occasional non-standard phonetic spellings, however, cast light on the spoken language of the practitioners who wrote the bowls. Tis article deals with phonetic spellings of the subordinating (or relative) particle (י) דas either תor ט. It is difficult to discern a uniform phonetic condition for all occurrences of ת, but the examples suffice to prove that it is a genuine form. In the presently available documentation the form טoccurs solely before words beginning with aleph (< historical or ). Te latter form also occurs in Classical Mandaic as ט ˙ t. Tese spellings suggest that the realizations of the subordinating particle as t and ˆ t later attested in many Neo-Aramaic dialects go back at least as far as late Sasanian times. Keywords subordinating particle; relative pronoun; Jewish Babylonian Aramaic; Mandaic; Neo- Aramaic; phonetic spellings; incantation bowl; magic bowl * I would like to thank Dr. Hezy Mutzafi of Tel Aviv University for first drawing my attention to the relevance of Neo-Aramaic for the variant spellings of the subordinating particle in the magic bowls discussed in this study and for directing me to the appropriate studies. I would also like to thank Dr. Matthew Morgenstern of Haifa University for reading and commenting on a draf of the article and for many of the photographs published herein. My appreciation is likewise extended to Prof. Shaul Shaked of the Hebrew University and Dr. Dan Levene of the University of Southampton for permission to quote from unpublished bowls in the Mar- tin Schøyen (MS) and Samir Dehays (SD) collections, respectively (for the SD bowls quoted here, see Dan Levene, Jewish Aramaic Curse Texts fom Late-Antique Mesopotamia [Leiden: E.J. Brill, forthcoming]). I am grateful to Prof. Joachim Marzahn of the Vorderasiatisches Museum for facilitating my study of the VA bowls and for permission to publish photographs of three of them. Bowls labeled JNF or Wolfe are in private collections and are being prepared for publication by the present author. I would like to thank Ms. Lisa Marie Knothe and Mr. L. Alexander Wolfe for access to the bowls. Partially preserved (but in my opinion certain) letters